According to the euobserver (https://euobserver.com/justice/130296), the UK Royal Navy’s “HMS Richmond is to move from the Suez Canal area to near Libya for at least two months, joining the existing eight vessels in EUnavfor Med, an EU anti-smuggler operation”. The ship supplements the other ships already in place and includes “an unmanned aerial system which can cover vast areas”, along with “185 personnel, a helicopter, and anti-ship missiles”. The mission is “to stop human smuggling in the Mediterranean” and designed to “apprehend suspected smugglers or traffickers (and to assure that) they will be taken to the ‘nearest safe port in Europe’ and face ‘prosecutorial action in that country”’. “We’re pleased that the Royal Navy is confident in our imagers and pleased to support a humanitarian use of our technology, such as this one”, said a Hood Tech Vision representative.

When Hood Tech began producing 800-gm video-camera turrets in 1998, it enabled an entirely new class of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Hood Technology Vision now designs and manufactures imaging and video processing systems at the highest level of the National Imagery Interpretability Rating Scale (NIIRS): Level 9. Hood Tech Vision matches embedded stabilization technology with electro-optical lenses that zoom up to 200X. This results in a field of view of 0.24 degrees, in payloads that weigh from less than one to six kg. Hood Tech Vision imagers consume as little as one-fifth the power common for such systems, increasing the power budget available to other sensors for Multi-INT missions.

Designed for manned and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), boats, land vehicles, and towed and stationary mounts, the reliability and utility of Hood Tech’s daylight and thermal imaging products has been demonstrated during more than 900,000 hours of use in a variety of temperatures, humidity, dust, smoke, haze, and other environmental factors (http://www.hoodtechvision.com).

Dr. Andy von Flotow founded Hood Technology in Hood River, Oregon in 1993. Along with the design and manufacture of stabilized imaging systems, Hood Tech: